Chapter 20 Eighteen, flutter on the books

When my daughter was two years old, my mother read fairy tales to her. She stared at the book in her mother's hand and asked in amazement: "There are words in it, where is the story?" Now, at the age of five, she has recognized many words. , Mom still reads fairy tales to her. After reading, she will hold the book by herself to carefully identify the words on it, and find out the story her mother just read.I watched her concentrate and thought, I must have gone through a similar process when I was a child.After a person has learned to read, he will look at books with a different eye.At least since the upper grades of elementary school, I have had a world of books in my eyes, which makes me feel both curious and revered.Every book, whether I read it or not, fascinates me. I believe that there must be something interesting or important hidden in it, waiting for me to find them.

When I was in the sixth grade of elementary school, my family moved to the southwest corner of People's Square, very close to the Shanghai Library.There is an open-air reading room in the library, where many people sit and read. One day I mustered up the courage to go in, but was blocked.According to regulations, one must be at least 1.45 meters tall to be eligible to enter this reading room, and I am still far behind.After graduating from elementary school, I got the admission ticket for the junior high school entrance examination. I heard that with this certificate, I can enter the museum. I was overjoyed.During the whole summer vacation, I sat in that open-air reading room almost every day to read.I remember that the first book I borrowed was Hugo's. The administrator looked at me suspiciously, not believing that an eleven-year-old could understand it.I really couldn't read it, so I turned a few pages and obediently returned it.This experience hit me hard, and it made me dare not touch foreign classics for a long time.Until I was in high school, I still found it difficult to read foreign novels. I couldn’t remember the names of people or understand the plot.The same goes for foreign films.Every weekend, there are two movie screenings in the auditorium of Shanghai Middle School, one for free and one for a dime.Most of the films shown were foreign films. I was so rustic that sometimes I fell asleep because I couldn't understand them.

However, my love for books continued unabated, and I developed a book-buying habit very early on.The first time I bought a book was when I was just in elementary school. I really wanted to have a comic book of my own. After saving a little change, I went to a small stall and chose a copy of "Ji Chang Learning Archery".I chose this book because I had just enough change, and I had read it again, and was moved by Ji Chang's perseverance in practicing his skills.After I bought it, I was very happy for several days.When I was in the third grade of junior high school, my family moved to Jiangning Road. It took five stops to take the tram from home to school. It only cost four cents, and it took an hour to walk.Because my family was poor, my father only gave me four cents a day for a one-way bus fare. I couldn't even bear to spend this money, and I always walked back and forth.The long section of the journey is the bustling Nanjing West Road. When I come back from school, it is the busiest time. There are a lot of goods in the windows on both sides. It would be a lie to say that those exquisite pastries have no temptation for me, but I am thinking about this section The two second-hand bookstores on the road went forward bravely without looking aside.These two second-hand bookstores are two spiritual lighthouses in the ocean of material temptations. Every time I pass by, I must go in. If I have enough money in my pocket, I will buy a book I like.Of course, it is often the case that I have taken a fancy to a certain book, but I don't have enough money, so I have to check every day to see if the book is still there, and I can't breathe a sigh of relief until I save enough money to buy it.When I was in high school, I lived on campus, and I had to take a suburban bus from home to school, and the round-trip fare was 50 cents.I go home every two weeks, and my father gives me two yuan a month, one yuan for the ride, and one yuan for petty expenses.This makes me feel as if I have a lot of money when I buy books. For this reason, I always trek on more than ten kilometers of suburban roads happily.It was a difficult time for the country's economy, the shops were slumped, and the few sweets and snacks in the windows were marked with scary prices.What I wonder is, how can anyone still buy it, and how many books can be bought with the same money.On weekends, I couldn't stay at home, so I went to the second-hand bookstore near my home on Nanjing West Road.My eldest brother admires my eagerness to learn. He often follows me quietly and waits for me to come out at the door of the bookstore.After entering college, I still lived a very poor life just to buy books.My family remits me five yuan of pocket money every month, and needless to say, it is all spent in second-hand bookstores.For a period of time, I returned the food ticket for one meal every day, sent steamed buns with boiled water, and saved money to buy books.From middle school to my sophomore year of university, I accumulated more than 200 books, which were lost during the Cultural Revolution.

When I reminisced about Shanghai Middle School, I always saw a thin and small student sitting in the reading room reading a book, and a quotation from Gorky was posted on the wall: "I threw myself on the book, just like a hungry person on bread." In fact, I can no longer figure out whether this sentence is really posted there, or I read it from elsewhere and grafted it on the wall of the reading room of Shanghai Middle School in my memory.In any case, this sentence was indeed magical to me at the time, and it very aptly expressed the mood and state of a hungry young man.I am also very grateful to the "China Youth Daily" at that time. It often published some great people's hard work and inspirational quotes, which injected a strong perseverance into my strong thirst for knowledge.I work very hard, the school stipulates that students must take a nap, but I often sneak out of the dormitory to read in the classroom.The administrator of our dormitory was very strict with the students. If he found out that he slipped out of the dormitory during nap time, he would be severely reprimanded, so I hated him very much.Later, this person was sentenced because he took advantage of his position to rape many girls. It can be seen that most decent people are male robbers and female prostitutes.In middle school, I have regarded learning as the most noble cause in life.In my poems at that time, I laughed at those who were obsessed with material pleasures, saying that I was only obsessed with knowledge, and my ambition was to "study a lifetime encyclopedia" and "read all the best books in the world."Of course, I am not without utilitarianism. There is a poem written like this: "It's hard to be amazing if you don't have a job. The desire to excel academically.I am also eager to succeed, but it seems that I firmly believe that the only way to success is learning.

Because of this, there is one thing that stimulated me a lot, that is, my sister dropped out of school and went to work.When I was in the second year of junior high school, she was in the third year of junior high school. One day near the summer vacation, she didn't go home after school.In the evening, one of her best classmates came to my house to inform my father, saying that my sister had repeated a grade and was afraid to go home, so she hid in her house, hoping that my father would not beat my sister.Not long after she left, my sister returned timidly.My good friend's pleas were completely ineffective. The father had never beaten the child so hard, and my sister's crying for mercy made my heart tremble.The next semester was not yet over. One day, she went home and told her father that a military factory in Shaanxi was recruiting workers from the school. She signed up and the school agreed.She looked very happy.Soon after, she set off for Baoji.She is honest and popular, and received many gifts from her classmates before leaving.From signing up to leaving home, she was always happy, without any sign of sadness.However, I feel very sad for her.I can't imagine that if a person gives up studying at the age of fifteen and becomes a worker, what meaning and future will there be in his life.

Although I love reading, I didn't know what books to read throughout my middle school years.I haven't met a single person who can point and guide me, and I'm always groping in the dark.When I was in junior high school, I continued reading in elementary school and read many fairy tales and folk tales.Then, I was fascinated by anti-special thrillers from the Soviet Union and China, and science fiction novels such as "The Strange Old Man", and I also read a few Sherlock Holmes detective stories, such as, and I temporarily fantasized about being a detective in the future.Finally, because of the recommendation of the school librarian, I read "Bitter Cauliflower", "Lin Haixueyuan", "Song of Youth" and almost all the contemporary Chinese novels that were famous at that time.I also read "Selected Works of Mao" because it was a set of books I was familiar with in my father's cabinet since I was a child, and I have read it with a vague understanding.I also write reading notes, including summaries and experiences.In the second year of junior high school, the Shanghai Communist Youth League organized the "Red Flag Medal Reading Movement" among middle school students. I handed a book of reading notes to the head teacher. No one in the class studied as hard as I did, so I naturally won the award.After I entered high school, I read a lot of miscellaneous books, but I still didn't read any really important books, basically some booklets on literature, history and philosophy, which were despised by me not long after.Perhaps the only exception is a set of history of Chinese literature compiled by Peking University, which gave me a general understanding of Chinese classical literary masterpieces, and I began to read Tang poetry, Song Ci, and novels such as .Out of my sense of the mystery of the universe, I also read some astronomy pamphlets.For a while, I wanted to improve my writing skills, so I carefully extracted beautiful sentences from various novels and essays.In order to increase my vocabulary, I actually read the dictionary seriously, and copied the entries I thought were useful in my notebook while reading.However, I finally discovered that these practices are not only unhelpful to writing, but harmful.It's a good thing I haven't been doing this for long, otherwise, I might have become a mediocre writer of rhetoric.What I gained from reading in middle school is definitely not the specific influence of a certain book on me, but the habit of reading.Since then, I have taken homework very secondary and spent more time reading extracurricular books.